Your Time Is Now
by thaw
Summary: The sorceress' knight returns to Balamb Garden. A bargain is struck.


**Title**: "Your Time Is Now".

**Author**: thawed.

**Rating**: PG-13 for language.

**Summary**: The sorceress' knight is summoned to Balamb Garden at the end of the war. A bargain is struck.

**Spoilers**: Yes. End of game.

**Disclaimer**: The recognisable characters appearing in this story are © Squaresoft, all rights reserved. They are used without permission and for entertainment purposes only. No profit is being made by the author for writing this story. No infringement upon nor challenge to the rights of the copyright holders is intended; nor should any be inferred.

**A/N**: Should be brought to the attention of the reader that this wasn't intended to be Seifer x Squall. But... it sure came out strange.

British spelling used throughout.

--

**Your Time Is Now**

_Change everything you are,  
__And everything you were:  
__Your number has been called.  
__Fights, and battles have begun.  
__Revenge will surely come.  
__Your hard times are ahead.  
__Best, you've got to be the best,  
__You've got to change the world,  
__And use this chance to be heard.  
__  
Your time is now.  
__Your time is now._

_--_

__

The commander's secretary -- pretty little thing, pale like a ghost -- is frightened of the sorceress' knight. Seifer notes this, amused, as he leans over her desk and grins pleasantly and drums calloused gunblader's fingers on the wood.

"Hi there. Got an appointment with the commander: name's Seifer Almasy."

She nods, a nervous twitch of her head, and manages a spasm of a smile as she breathes, "The commander is b-busy, sir. Please wait until he is able to see you."

"Yes, ma'am."

He sidles away, feeling her gaze, frightened, suspicious, curious, pressed to his back as he makes his way towards the blue spiral-patterned seats, and the stupid grin dies a hurried death. _Welcome back, Seifer. Everyone's just overjoyed to see you._

He notes to himself that he misses the heavy wash of his trenchcoat around his ankles, but the trenchcoat, like his mistress, was in ruins by the end of the war, tattered and fading. He had woken from the cold numb horror of Time Compression and thrown it into a river, watching it darken as it sank. He misses Raijin, who was killed -- _or murdered, but how do you distinguish the two when everybody's dead?_ -- in Deling City by rebel Galbadian forces. There's a gaping Raijin-shaped hollow inside him that aches like a lost limb, and when his thoughts slide over it the pain is soft and cold and lonely, so he doesn't do that often.

And, Hyne knows, some of him has missed this place.

Sometimes, lying awake at night in Galbadia, where the dark was as oppressive as a hot tight hand around him and Ultimecia whispered madly in his head, he thought of his cramped little dorm and the ridiculous cadet's uniform he never wore and Quistis Trepe's shrill voice when she was angry and the greasy canteen food, hot dogs so slick with oil you could slide them along a table from one end to the other, and _wished_--

But wishes don't come true; being a sorceress' knight isn't romantic; there are no heroes to be found amongst killers.

Today, it seems, only two of those are true.

He thumbs through a copy of June's "Weapons Monthly", fingertips slip-sliding over the glossy pages, although he only reads one word in every four, and the pictures swim before his eyes.

If he's really honest with himself, there's something else he's missed, and it -- _he_ -- is on the other side of the ornate double-doors over there, sitting behind the Headmaster's desk with three golden stripes on his collar and a well-practiced scowl.

But they're not children any more. Quistis, Zell, Selphie, Leonhart. _Me_.

All grown up, and isn't it a wonderful world we live in?

_No_.

He supposes that saving the world -- and now, without Ultimecia coaxing him towards dreams of righteousness, he knows, bitterly, that they did -- will do that to you. Because once you've killed a man, once you've stood over a cold-red-red body and looked at the _blood_, stark and beautiful and shocking, on your gloves, things can only be different.

A thousand men later, Seifer feels old and tired, but he doesn't feel guilty.

_Late nights drinking Dollet vodka, making jokes about chickens in the hallway, flirting with the pretty blonde girl in Class A-4B. _

_It's all distant, now_.

If this is growing up, Seifer knows why he avoided it for so long.

--

Fifteen minutes later, he is still waiting.

He watches the hands of the clock shift 'round. The hall is like an anaesthetic, bright and stiff and sterile, no place for troubled thoughts, but those are the only thoughts Seifer can manage, so he sits with head down and arms folded and meanders from notion to notion, skipping around pain like water around oil.

"The commander will see you now," the secretary chirrups, and he glances up wearily before getting to his feet. He grins again, and she jumps like a startled mouse. He tells himself that he'll stop enjoying that some day as he pushes open the double-doors.

He has been summoned three times previously to the Headmaster's office. _First day at Balamb Garden; when Trepe filed a complaint about my behaviour in class; and when I accidentally-with-some-intention hacked open Leonhart's face._ It is as he remembers it, almost: furnished in gleaming chestnut wood and blue velvet, desk set in the centre and littered with papers and little pieces of gadgetry, sofas and straight-backed chairs arranged neatly around a fireplace in one corner, everything absurdly decadent.

Squall Leonhart doesn't look up as he enters, scribbling away on a report in small neat handwriting turned wild.

"Hi, Zell." His voice is tight with stress.

"Now, now. If you're going to tell me off for being a very naughty sorceress' knight, you're going to have to get my name right."

Squall raises his head, but he doesn't jump like a startled mouse. He is brilliantly pale, punctuated by dark solemn eyes and dark jagged hair and the vicious line of the scar searing down between his eyebrows. He wears the black and gold SeeD uniform awkwardly, jacket buttoned up to a collar emblazoned with the three stripes of a commander behind the elaborate trim.

"Hello, Seifer," he says, and is this the quiet cold glaring boy from the back of Trepe's classroom who screamed when Shiva was pushed into his head?

Seifer gives a sarcastic wave, standing tall in the doorway. "Well, hello there, Mr. Commander, sir. Isn't this just the _greatest_?"

"No," Squall says flatly. "It isn't. It would be a lot better if you weren't in my office, and some Esthari soldier had killed you." He sits back in his chair and folds his arms and looks at Seifer. "Sit down."

Seifer sneers, and says, in a drawling Galbadian accent that found its way into his voice over the last six months, "Have to tell you: I'd rather not be here, so why don't I just leave?"

"If you do, one of the Esthari soldiers outside might accidentally pull the trigger," Squall replies evenly, "and you'll find yourself lying on the ground with a bullet in your back. You're a perpetrator of war crimes. They'll treat you as such. So you might want to stick around." In his own way, Squall is more frightening than Ultimecia, Seifer thinks: this weird pale creature of violence and desperate love, with the power of a thousand mercenaries in his hand. Seifer resurrects his grin, but it's as false as he feels.

"Aren't you just a barrel of laughs. They must _love_ you down in the ranks."

Squall flicks his heavy gleaming hair out of his eyes. "I'm not a nice person. I don't pretend to be. But at least I got myself onto the right side of this war."

With a deep dry laugh, Seifer says, "Oh, yeah? So how'd you figure it that early on?"

"I chose the side without a crazy psycho-sorceress on it."

Seifer thinks of Ultimecia, hand soothing and soft in his hair, smiling down at him with peculiar affection, washing the blood from his arms--

"She wasn't that bad," he replies, softly.

"And Time Compression was a happy walk in the park. _Whatever_." Squall opens a drawer in the desk and takes out a packet of cigarettes; slips one out and puts it between his lips. He lights it with a little blue lighter from his jacket, and breathes out curls of white-grey smoke, tapping ash onto the carpet as he leans back.

"So, what are you going to do with me?" Ultimecia's knight grins, eyes bright and sardonic. "Hope they're still suckers for the death penalty 'round here, 'cause, y'know, I escaped that once."

"Actually, around here they favour life imprisonment."

"Well, damn. And I was hoping for a slap on the hand."

Squall is silent.

"What's the matter, Leonhart? Am I ruining your fairytale dream of living happily ever after, birds singing and flowers growing and all that?"

"What you've never learnt, Seifer, is that there's no room for fairytales in the real world." Squall waves the hand with a cigarette slipped between the fingers. "So you can sit in the cell they've got ready for you for the rest of your life and think of dreams, but I'll be in my Garden, Commander of SeeD, and the only difference between us is dreams. And now you have no right to hope for anything better than you receive, and the only person to blame is yourself."

"I can plead manipulation." Seifer hears the note of desperation in his own voice, but Squall is already shaking his head.

"No, you can't. You know I won't let you."

"Yeah?"

"I can get the law under my thumb without trying."

"Bullshit."

"I killed as many people as you, Seifer, if not more, and I'm still a hero. Think about it. I'll bring you down."

"Because I tortured you."

Squall shrugs and draws deeply on his cigarette. His hair is heavy across his face again, and Seifer can't see his eyes. "If you like."

"You _bastard_."

"Yes. I'm a bastard. I don't care. I'll be around long after you've decayed down in some dank little hole. Life's a bitch, isn't it?"

"Not for you. You've got your _Garden_, and your _friends_, and your _fiancé_."

"You didn't hear. Well, that's hardly surprising."

"What?"

"Rinoa's dead." Squall's voice is quiet, and shock is a white cold knife in Seifer's chest as the words wind through his ears. "She was killed in Timber by rebel Galbadian forces. Looks like you got your way. You couldn't have her, and now no-one ever will." Squall's spare fingers open the clasp of the pendant around his neck, and he holds the heavy silver chain in his hand and swings the roaring lion-cross before his face. "Did you write irony into your dreams, Seifer? Because there's an awful lot of it floating around."

"What do you want me to say?" Seifer demands, all wound up like a snake rearing to bite. "Sorry? I _didn't do it_."

"I don't want you to say anything. Like I said, life's a bitch. I might have killed Ultimecia, saved the whole fucking world, but I don't get a fairytale ending. You gave your soul to a sorceress, killed and bled and died for her, and you don't get one either." He drops the pendant, and it falls with a loud hollow crunch of the silver chain on wood. Squall looks at it. "Dreams are for nothing. You'll understand that one day."

"When did she die?"

"Yesterday."

"Who got her power?"

"Fujin."

Seifer's face twists, and he starts forward, snarling, "That's not funny. That's not funny, you sick little--"He finds himself suddenly staring at Squall's outstretched hand. The gloved fingers are white and eerie with a half-formed Blizzaga.

"Don't come any closer," Squall says calmly. Ultimecia's knight backs down, and the spell fades. Squall taps cigarette ash onto the floor. "She gave herself over to Esthari forces three hours ago."

"Yeah, and you've got the Esthari army under your thumb too, right?"

"My father's the President of Esthar," Squall says resentfully. "Laguna Loire."

"Well, well, one of us got a parent in the end. Congratulations, Leonhart."

Squall throws down his cigarette and stamps it into the carpet, venom tightening his mouth briefly. "I hate him. He's self-absorbed and clumsy and stupid. I was better off an orphan."

He rises from his chair and goes to one of the wide windows, and for the first time Seifer sees the brilliant electric-blue of LionHeart in his rival's hand, the blade a line of bright diamond. Revolver is a ridiculous and distant thought.

"I heard about Raijin," Squall continues. He takes a handful of fat purple bullets from his pocket and drops them into the barrels of his gunblade one by one. They click as they fall into place. "I'd give my sympathies, but you'd see straight through it. Raijin and Fujin mean nothing to me, because your "posse" were useless in the end: they didn't manage to stop you."

"Shut up."

"So what have we learnt from this, Seifer?" Click. "We've played out a great charade of "good" and "evil", and in the end people are still dead, and the world's still wrong, and blame is dealt out, but it doesn't set it right." Click. "Because there's no such thing as "good" and "evil". I loved Rinoa, and she's gone." Click. "Does that make her evil, because in that split-second a Galbadian made a choice, and she ended up dead?" Click. "Does it make Raijin evil, or Ultimecia, or the thousands of people we killed between us?" Click. "Does it make me good, and you evil, because I won and you lost?"

Quiet, vehement, "_No._"

Squall weighs his gunblade in his hand and says, "Ultimecia believed in what she was doing. Somehow, in her head, it was the right thing to do. Rinoa saw the good in you. I could only ever hate you, but she found something and she latched onto it. You're not evil, and I'm not good. We're both as bad as each other. I should pay for what I've done, although I never will, but you'll pay for what you've done a hundred times over."

Squall raises his gunblade, and Seifer looks down the lethal edge to the narrowed eyes as Squall, standing vividly pale in the morning light, flicks the safety catch off.

They stare at each other for a moment, before Squall lowers the gunblade and sheathes it at his hip.

"So I'm going to make you an offer. I'm not doing it for you; don't delude yourself otherwise." He opens a second drawer in his desk, and draws out a sheet of paper. As he reads it over, he says, "I'm doing it for Rinoa, and Ultimecia, and all the people who, in the end, just got in the way of our feud, and paid for it with their lives. Because I've grown up, and you have too, and if I can't do this, then, in the end, I'm worse." He hands the sheet to Seifer.

"This is a contract. Sign it, and I'll make it go away. All your sins. Your name will be erased from every register, every record, every book. "Seifer Almasy" will cease to mean anything to anyone. Your existence will be removed. In exchange, you'll disappear."

When it comes down to it, he's being offered a choice of freedom or imprisonment, and Seifer knows which he'd rather have. He takes the ballpoint offered to him and signs it without bothering to look the paper over.

Squall watches him with stark, keen eyes. "And if you ever allow me to discover you again, I'll kill you," he states, and it's a testament to the violent world they live in that Seifer doesn't flinch. Squall sits down at his desk and starts on another cigarette. "Think of it as a punishment from me to you. Because all you ever wanted was to be noticed, to be the centre of attention, to have glory and renown and power. You dared to dream of life as a sorceress' knight, and now you'll pay for it."

"Where do I go?"

"I don't care. I'd recommend Galbadia. It's the only place in the world where I have no influence. I'll have Fujin released. Keep your head down, and your dreams to yourself, and you'll be fine."

"No, I won't," Seifer says.

"Right. You won't be fine. And that's the point."

"What about you?"

Squall looks up, and, suddenly, he looks tired and gaunt and sick with grief, and the scar between his eyes is a livid brand. It's the expression of a drowning man, and Seifer's seen it before: when Edea shot Leonhart full of shimmering ice in Deling City. Squall looks down at his hands, toying with the glowing cigarette. "Rinoa's gone. I'm on anti-depressant medication for PTSD, but I find a fake smile and a razorblade to the arm works better." He gathers his pendant from the desk and clasps it his neck. "I'm the second most important person in the world, and I couldn't care less. I hate attention, being in the spotlight, having people know my business, but that's all I've got now, and I wouldn't have it if you hadn't leapt after Ultimecia. So I'll think of it as a punishment from you to me." His face softens into a blank, mouth and eyes flat, and he says, "I won't be fine, either."

Seifer nods, satisfied. "We're even."

"We're even. Goodbye, Seifer." Squall holds out his hand, and Seifer shakes it. There is a current of understanding between them.

"Bye, Leonhart. Have a nice life."

"You too."

As Seifer leaves, Zell Dincht pushes past him without a glance and strides into the melancholy blue of Leonhart's office, all wiry energy and bright expression.

"Hey, Squall!"

Squall looks up, and the smile is there, small and lopsided and fake, but his eyes are a bleak wasteland that only Seifer will ever see.

"Hey, Zell."

"Look, man, I just came up to ask..."

The door closes.

_We're not going to be fine_, Seifer thinks, and it's enough.

All grown up, and isn't it a wonderful world we live in?

--

_Don't let yourself down,  
__Don't let yourself go:  
__Your last chance has arrived.  
__Best, you've got to be the best,  
__You've got to change the world,  
__And use this chance to be heard.  
__Your time is now._

_Your time is now._

End.

--

This story was strangely difficult to write. I have to confess that before I began I didn't like Seifer much, if at all. (However, I did like Squall, and still do. But you could probably have guessed that.)

I thought the characters in FFVIII were very strong, even the ones I didn't like. I got very annoyed the first time I read a 'fic using the theory that Seifer had been controlled by Ultimecia. If you allow that theory, then you're scrubbin' out some really great in-game character development: Seifer turning from angry and bitter soldier to cruel, self-deluded sorceress' knight. So, as a kind of reactionary piece, I wrote this, in which I _won't_ excuse Seifer of all the nasty things he did, because I think it was Seifer, and not Ultimecia's lapdog, doing them. And yet, I've finished it and realised that I like him.

Why did I kill off Rinoa? Not through any deep-rooted hatred. Just because, for the purposes of this, she was better off dead. It was more effective. Ditto Seifer's trenchcoat. I went against the game there, because in the final FMV he certainly has it.

The song featured at the beginning and end is "Butterflies and Hurricanes" by Muse. The song is perfect for the ridiculously epic scale of the battle between Squall and Seifer (and it's a damn fine track, too). Finally, feel free to leave feedback. I love to hear from people, have them tell me what they liked, what they didn't, and all. This is my first time for this sort of thing, so don't be too easy on me, or I'll never learn.

-- thawed.


End file.
